They’ve been called
the post-modern Marx Brothers, but a more apt comparison would be the
post-modern Three Stooges. Stella, the comedy group of State alumni
Michael Showalter, Michael Ian Black and David Wain, is billed as “Dumb
comedy dressed up in a suit” by Comedy Central and that bears
remembering.
As loose versions
of themselves, Stella spend their first episode careening through life
as clueless noisy apartment dwellers who get themselves evicted as a
result, then have no idea what it means to apply for a $3 million co-op,
going before the board for an interview when they don’t even have the
money.
The Marx Brothers,
at least Groucho anyway, were smarter than everyone else in the room in
the anarchy they brought to scenes and stories. The Stooges, obviously,
were the idiot bulls in the china shops. Stella, although more verbal
and articulate, are the idiots in the china shop -- who think they will
save their landlord from a heart attack with crude clueless surgery.
The twist of
course, ends up being a piece of dark comedy from nearly out of nowhere,
when Stella are rewarded for botching the surgery because their patient
was Nazi Joseph Mengele in hiding, pleasing a Jewish group that had been
trying to find him. “Kind of ironic that it was your botched surgery
that killed him,” they’re told.
It remains to be
seen how this fusion of idiocy with a smart black humor underneath can
work.
